CATALYST Rewilding

When imagining a city or any dense urban area, what typically comes to mind is many buildings made with combinations of concrete, glass, and steel. There are streets and bridges with many cars, construction sites, and the noises that accompany all of it. This environment is not one conducive to plant and animal life, nor is it beneficial to the health and overall mental or emotional well-being of humans. Studies have been done on the concept of rewilding, where elements of wilderness are restored at various scales to allow the regrowth of ecosystems with minimal interference. One way of doing this is by creating space to accommodate native animals with bird houses, beehives, bat boxes etc., or adding more greenspace and pollinator friendly plants to urban landscaping. In some cases, a keystone species is reintroduced to bring balance back to the ecosystem.

The natural environment, (or lack thereof in urban settings), informs the secondary catalyst: rewilding. While Cincinnati has several parks and greenspaces available to the public yearround, the urban core lacks significant exposures to nature on a large scale. Industrialization and growth of the city effectively removed much of the existing environment. Through the concept of rewilding, positive change can be made. According to Siân Moxon, rewilding the city would mitigate urban overheating, surface flooding, and poor air quality due to traffic and appliance use. Biodiversity is incredibly important to the health of the environment and human well-being, and as climate change progresses, the damage done to ecosystems will only continue to worsen. By creating space for nature to heal, urban Cincinnati can heal. Moxon notes that many cities in Britain have embraced domestic urban gardens to support wildlife diversity and regrowth despite their small size, (Moxon 2019). When looking at Cincinnati, obsolete spaces are the perfect place to give nature a second chance.

Often, abandoned places become overgrown and unmanageable after several years when nature stakes its claim. Unintentional “rewilding” in this way is common, but in order to allow humans space to interact with nature in a previously obsolete space, safety and intentionality must be prioritized. How can native flora and fauna be reintroduced in a way that celebrates their beauty, gives wildlife more space, and affords urban populations the opportunity to be immersed within it all? Intentional rewilding of the obsolete would engage not only nature but also the community, and curb waste linked to redevelopment of the space.

As a catalyst, I chose to look at rewilding because of the success it can have when paired with obsolescence. Rewilding is also a beneficial practice for urban areas on many different scales. According to Donald C. Dearborn, “Often, cities do not contain large enough habitat blocks to sustain viable natural populations of most plants and animals, but small blocks can link with surrounding habitat on the city margins,” (Dearborn et al. 2010). He describes the importance of these blocks as steppingstones to bridge the gap between the environment and dense urban areas. If an obsolete building or structure housed one or more of these natural corridors, cities could potentially have a network of these rewilded spaces which would benefit humans and other living things.

The most hands off approach to rewilding is to completely let nature swallow up an obsolete space or building and reinvigorate life in its own way. While letting plants and animals take over an abandoned building and letting people immerse themselves into the space sounds like a good idea, without some human interference it could get out of control and become dangerous or be seen as an eyesore. The more curated form of greenspaces in cities involve parks and occasionally conservatories with massive tropical plants, both of which require frequent attention and maintenance to preserve the serenity and beauty that attracts people to them. There must be a balance in allowing nature to rewild in its own way and be attractive to urban dwellers as a safe immersive experience to reconnect with the environment. This approach requires intentionality, which moves into biophilic design.